Planet maemo: category "feed:ef77b130294f7a64b7d9c05ed40b7044"

“It may be time for the iPhone to more than just grow. It may be time for it to grow up and take on the whole market. Five billion people are waiting”.

The prepaid market usually means two certain things: cheap phones and low monthly service costs. I do think though the number of users that don’t want their hands tied for 24 months contracts is increasing, but not by that much.

A cheaper iPhone although possible, shouldn’t be a compromise compared to a full fledged one.

Now, let’s make an exercise of imagination; say you’re Apple: what would you get rid of from you iPhone 4 in order to make it cheaper, without compromising the quality or the functionality? Start naming software and / or hardware features.

Is it the camera? Maybe, but it’ll compromise the pictures quality. Is it the display? Maybe, but you’ll have to forget about retina display shout. Is it the RAM? It’d be like downgrading the iPhone 4 to iPhone 3G: forget about it running flawlessly the Infinity Blade… How about putting cheap plastic instead of Gorilla glass? Yeah, right, over Jobs’ dead body maybe.

The only thing a “prepaid iPhone” would have to do is to cope with the apps / iOS; this means: same display resolution, same CPU, same RAM, same connectivity, same interface; maybe not necessarily the same storage (I wonder whether that’d be enough to lower the price with 200$…). Altogether, let’s not forget the iCloud that can possibly act like a remote storage…

I don’t think lowering the specs is a solution; the only one I can imagine now is a dramatic change in iPhone’s architecture, which means a new production line, from scratch. The result could hardly be named “another iPhone”, but “another Apple product”. Wouldn’t that better be some kind of iPod, instead?

[...] for all Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, the company has now reached a point where the more it excels, and it often does, the more it is perceived as a threat by individuals and governments around the world.

I’d add a corollary: The more it tries to bring solutions to everybody and for everything, the more their “Each individual served with relevant ad” goal becomes just a mere byproduct.

There’s no difference between Google reaching its goal and an increasingly powerful and over-responsible government; they both can say they pursue the best for each and every individual, but never mention the cost that individual has to pay. That cost is very hard to measure until it’s already too late: it’s usually called freedom.

The argument is easy: because French don’t have a culture of correcting what they have already published, the articles have to come out as good as they can get; there’s no second chance to correct and rectify them. Therefore, the government found appropriate to cut Twitter and Facebook from the sources of mass media because:
a) Those sources aren’t always reliable
b) Social media is always an open door for abusers.

The government thus considers the new age social media cannot be made or hold responsible for the data it generates and transmits.

(Filloux says these are the arguments, not necessarily that he embraces them)

I like the argument; it expresses entirely my feeling that the main differentiator between socialism and capitalism (at their core) is that capitalist journalism lets you know what’s happening around you, while the socialist journalism tells you what you need to know about what’s happening around you.

The tyranny of the accountability has its roots in the mindset that the public has to understand precisely and specifically only those certain things it’s told and nothing else. The socialist public is not allowed to see the picture and then let to form its own opinions about it; that’s way too risky. In the socialist countries the public is told what the official or “natural” opinion is about something or anything. You don’t taste the strawberries, you’re only told how they taste.

It’s only then the media gatekeepers get the feeling of “over-accountability”: when they feel responsible for what people might understand by their own.

In this line, besides accountability, I’d add a second argument for French government getting against Twitter and Facebook: these social networks differ from “curated” media maybe by being “unreliable”, but most important by being “un-curatable”. Which is “extremely hard to be censored”.

I am convinced this is not a correct or fair mindset, no matter which time, country or medium; after some more other years of decay, this usually ends up in bloodbaths, when hundreds of years of evolution are wiped out in hours.

It turns out the N9 is just a dummy, a mere prototype of future WP powered Nokias. Elop carefully misses every opportunity to enter Nokia’s history; he’s busy building Microsoft’s with Nokia’s flesh and blood.

I wonder whether MeeGo could have become a solid technological and architectural competitor to iOS, both Android and WP being just simple hoaxes against it. I also wonder whether Jobs could use such a sound competitor as a secondary route.

There is no direct or natural connection between human values and money.

Money is a symbol, the same way a word is a symbol. Money is also a mutual agreement saying “This is just a paper, but it certifies that this product has human value of X; I am, therefore, X”.

The similarity between money and words is that both are symbols and agreements. The difference, though, lies in how they are that “symbol”. A word says “I am a symbol which could never be substituted for the thing it means”. You never equal the word “horse” to the real animal.

With the money, things are just the opposite: money is a symbol that stands more and more for the real value it symbolizes. The more “money” stands for “human value”, the more we’re driven away from reality.

Skype was 8 billion. Apple has 60. None of these cash piles has any real connection to human value. If you’re looking for real values you have to look at people, and not at what stands for them, but at what they are standing for.

An ugly GUI is something you only use because you need the service behind that GUI. The companies that don’t care about it, they don’t care about their users. Or, worse, they are so lazy and are making so much money, that there’s no way they would change anything for their customers.

The uglier an interface, the more probable the developers forgot they were building things for human beings; instead, these developers are building things for… things.

The Silver Medal goes to Gmail:

The Gold Medal goes to Facebook settings panel:

The only problem is those two giants are spreading their “ugly love” in almost every digital soul of the WEB.

“Sharing the rediscovery of wonder“… At 08:38 I’ve started to feel something awfully important is going to be revealed: the sharing of the rediscovered wonder.

This wonder was apparently made possible by Janet Echelman alone; on a second look, you’ll notice there are thousands of people involved, from mere fishermen to mayors, designers, engineers, NOAA, all along 14 years of pursuing Janet’s dream.

The real wonder is neither a laced net transformed into art nor are Janet’s wild dreams, nor are those seven art schools that rejected her.

The real wonder is making those thousands of people fall in love with her dream, a love that deep that it transformed the cotton into steel.

And we are only half the way; the other half of the wonder is revealed by Janet’s friend, the attorney from Phoenix: the cotton turned into steel was not just art, it was magic. The laced net turned out to be… Magic.

I wish TheGuru would not have that a strong argument while leaving the Maemo / MeeGo community.

I wish this argument wouldn’t have been possible to be hold against Nokia.

I wish he would have been wrong.

To Nokia:

“To Nokia – make a freakin’ commitment. Commit to the developers who are constantly having to rewrite their apps every time you release a device. Commit to the consumers who are trying to get excited about purchasing a $500+ device that’s going to be incompatible with the next version. Commit to not make each device incompatible with the next version of your platform. Commit to developing the product line beyond ‘ooooh, shiny’ with each release.”

To Maemo community:

“(…)you’ve made a *big* change towards welcoming new people. Yeah, I’ve noticed, and you should be congratulated for improving so much in that regard. Keep it up. I hope for Nokia’s sake that you stick around”